thundering pity she hadn't voice
enough for comic opera. He had nothing to complain of;
the arrangement had been for a few weeks only, and had
cost him the merest trifle of travelling expenses; but
the day Elfrida went back to town he was inclined to
parley with her, to discuss the situation, and to make
suggestions for her future plan of action. His attitude
of visible regret added another thrill to the joy the
girl had in the thought of her undertaking; it marked a
point of her success, she thought, at least so far as
preliminaries went. Already, as she shrank fastidiously
into the corner of a third-class travelling-carriage,
her project seemed to have reached its original and
notable materialization. Chapters passed before her eyes
as they do sometimes in dreams, full of charm and beauty;
the book went through every phase of comedy and pathos,
always ringing true. Little half-formed sentences of
admirable art rose before her mind, and she hastily barred
them out, feeling that she was not ready yet, and it
would be mad misery to want them and to have forgotten
them. The thought of what she meant to do possessed her
wholly, though, and she resigned herself to dreams of
the most effective arrangement of her material, the
selection of her publisher, the long midnight hours alone
with Buddha, in which she should give herself up to the
enthralment of speaking with that voice which she could
summon, that elusive voice which she lived only, only to
be the medium for--that precious voice which would be
heard one day, yes, and listened-to.

She was so freshly impressed with the new life-lights,
curious, tawdry, fascinating, revolting, above all sharp
and undisguised, of the world she had left, that she saw
them already projected with a verisimilitude which, if
she had possessed the art of it, would have made her
indeed famous. Her own power of realization, assured her
on this point--nobody could see, not divine but _see_,
as she did, without being able to reproduce; the one
implied the other. She fingered feverishly the strap of
the little hand-bag in her lap, and satisfied herself by
unlocking it with a key that hung on a String inside her
jacket. It had two or three photographs of the women she
knew among the company, another of herself in her stage
uniform, a bill of the play, her powder-puff and rouge-box,
a scrap of gold lace, a young Jew's letter full of blots
and devotion, a rather vulgar sapphire bracelet, som